OFFICIAL Kissing Day Blogfest!

Woo-Hoo! I’m super excited about today and I didn’t even know it existed until about half an hour ago. It’s the OFFICIAL Kissing Day Blogfest! Bloggers all over the blogosphere are posting their favorite kissing scenes.

This kiss is from my current WIP Matches & Matrimony.

To set the scene a little Amanda (the narrator) and Jordan are good friends. Jordan is getting married in a month or so and he has been fighting with his fiancée, Sarahlynn. Amanda has a crush on Jordan, so the whole wedding business has been difficult for her. They are currently trapped in Amanda’s bathroom (it’s a long story involving a distracted contractor – Jordan – and a defective doorknob). Fortunately when they got trapped they had food with them (which is more than a little disgusting now that I think about it). Anyway, here it is:

“Are you going to eat the rest of your chips?” Jordan asked. I’d eaten my sandwich while he was telling me about this guy that he’d hired that was really nice, but a bit of an idiot who had to be walked through each step of every process about every time he did it. I knew how he felt.

“I’m willing to share,” I flirted. I immediately started berating myself. I wasn’t supposed to be flirting with him. He wasn’t available to flirt with.

He scooted from where he’d been sitting by the tub during our whole conversation over to where I was sitting by the sink. He started picking the chips off my plate.

“You’re a really good listener,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to totally unload on you like that. I guess it just all came out before I could stop it.”

I smiled. “It’s okay. We all need to unload every once in a while.”

He picked at my chips some more, then he turned and looked at me. “You’re a really good friend, Amanda.”

“You’re a good friend, too,” I replied.

Then, almost in slow motion, it happened. Jordan reached one hand over, cupped the back of my head in his large palm, and pulled my face to his. And then he kissed me. Not a simple, friendly kind of kiss, but a real kiss. A full, close-your-eyes-and-throw-yourself-into-it kind of kiss.

There was a part of me that immediately said that this was wrong, but the part of me that had been longing for this for months was louder, and I slipped one hand behind his neck and started to kiss him back.

He pulled away slightly, only for a moment, to angle his head a little better before claiming my lips once again, only now deepening the kiss. But that moment was all the rational part of my brain needed to tell me that what I was doing was wrong and that I needed to stop. And this time that voice won out.

I wrenched myself away from him, and quickly stood up. “Jordan!” I cried. “What are you doing? What are we doing?”

Jordan also stood. He looked slightly confused for a moment, before his eyes widened and I knew that he realized exactly what I was talking about.

“Oh, God,” he whispered, more as a prayer than an expletive. “Amanda, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have… I don’t know…”

“Jordan, I’m not the one you need to apologize to. That’s Sarahlynn.”

Jordan’s eyes grew wide again, before he closed them as though he were in extreme pain. “Sarahlynn,” he moaned.

“Yeah. You remember her. Your fiancée, Sarahlynn. The woman you’re going to marry in a month. That Sarahlynn.”

He sank back down to the floor and then buried his face in his hands. “What am I going to do?”

“Nothing,” I told him. “You do nothing. You say nothing. You change nothing. You only do exactly as you’ve planned on doing for the last three months. You marry Sarahlynn at Christmas. You forget that this ever happened.”

FTC Guidelines Stuff

About a month and a half ago or so I received an e-mail making me aware of some FTC guidelines about book reviews. It’s a little hazy about how this applies to blogs, but I’ll attempt to comply. Apparently, as a book reviewer I am supposed to disclose where I got the books that I review. Most of the books I review I either purchase myself, borrow from the library, or receive through Paperback Swap. There are some, however, that I have received for free from various conferences I have gone to. I frequently cannot remember which ones they are. No one has specifically asked me to review these books and I in no way benefit from someone else purchasing them after reading my review. The companies, of course, benefit from it, but I don’t believe that was their goal in giving them to me for free (but it may have been, I am not a mind reader :P)

Also, in the nature of full disclosure, if you click on the Paperback Swap link at the bottom of the page and then decide to join I should receive a free credit for recommending you. I have no idea how well this works because to my knowledge no one has tried it and I don’t really read computer code, so it may not be connected to my account correctly and I would never know. And to be honest, I’m not really that concerned about it. I want more to share the wonder of Paperback Swap with the world than to get the credit for it. The credits are just a bonus :P.

Hopefully this is what the FTC is looking for and they will not fine me thousands of dollars I don’t have.

Have a good day!